Japanese osoji for new year guarantees fresh start

Literally, it means free and clean. It refers to the year-end cleaning Japanese do. Not just a little neatening up. Hands-and-knees, sweat-equity scrubbing, sweeping, waxing and buffing so they enter the new year ready for whatever awaits them.

More broadly, it refers to the custom of getting your affairs squared away before Dec. 31. That means paying all overdue bills, performing any obligations yet unmet and metaphorically purifying yourself.

We move, if we follow the Oriental calendar, from the Year of the Rat to the Year of the Ox. And if we perform proper osoji, we'll burst through from rodent to bovine in fine fettle.

Geoff Tudor, a retired Japan Air Lines executive, and my sherpa/guru in all things Japanese, remembers that in some households, the paper shoji, those white squares framed in blonde wood you see in traditional homes, would be changed during the year-end cleaning ritual. "Many years ago," Geoff relates, "some friends who lived out in the boondocks had a fire, and their house burned down just before New Year's. In a flurry of activity, the local villagers organized collections of clothes and money for them." The family started the new year afresh.

Doug Erber, now president of the Japan America Society of Southern California, stayed with a host family featuring three generations, and during his first osoji, as a guest he was exempt from the three weekends leading up to New Year's when grandparents, parents and two daughters "all worked and cleaned with the precision of an Indy 500 pit crew."

While they were so engaged, Doug lugged his wetsuit into the house and began washing saltwater out of it in the family bathtub. On the second floor, the family finally heard the water running and thought Doug was "committing the unthinkable act of using their bath — a nearly sacrosanct part of every Japanese home — to clean my wetsuit." He finessed it by yelling that he was cleaning the bathroom so they wouldn't have to do it, then sneaked his wetsuit out of the house in a plastic bucket.

Father Jim Colligan, a Maryknoll priest now stationed in Little Tokyo, spent 40 years in Japan as a missionary and journalist. "That practice of cleaning things up for the New Year provided an apt theme to encourage all to clean up their heart and soul ... I believe it was effective," he told me.

James Bailey was Variety's Tokyo correspondent for many years and recalls his wife Yurika's family's devotion to osoji. "My in-laws are very traditional," James wrote me. "I do know they take the cleaning very seriously, dragooning their daughters into the task."

I spent 10 New Years in Japan. They were the most special part of the year. It was the only time that commercial Tokyo — with 20-plus million people a Big New York — shut down. Well, trains and subways, which usually stopped around midnight, ran all night so people could go to shrines and temples.

Temple bells rang 108 times so we could rid ourselves of the 108 sins that plague us all. There we would drop a coin into a lacquer box, wash our hands with a wooden ladle filled with water, light incense sticks, "bathe" our faces in their smoke, clap three times and pray — or, in my case, make a wish as I do on my birthday.

Somehow all the days of preparation for turning the calendar prepared me better to stick to my New Year's resolutions. So I leave that thought with you: osoji before the Rat becomes the Ox. And many happy clean returns.

— Mike Tharp is executive editor of the Merced Sun-Star. He can be reached at mtharpmercedsunstar.com.